Marissa Mayer was asked a question about ad blocking software's impact on the digital media business at a keynote session on Monday at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s conference in New York, during Advertising Week. She responded: "I really believe that commercials and ads make content better. The experience on the Web (without ads) becomes a lot less rich in my experience. I personally think it is a mistake." she elaborated on her thoughts stating: "The reason we have such tremendous resources is that we actually have ads that work. It is really important to keep that ecosystem vibrant. We need to make sure we have business models that work…I just think it makes the Internet better."

Ms. Mayer believes that in the long term, Native Advertising, is the future. Of course, native ads are part of Ms. Mayer’s strategy aimed at turning around Yahoo’s core business, advertising makes up a third of Yahoo's revenue. Which is better than making unblockable ads; but I'm sure someone, somewhere is working on that right now.

Ms Mayer is ignoring a big problem with Native Ads, however. Ego. They are the battle of the brands. Created by the content producers, tailoring an ad to "fit" within the publications usual style and standard sounds attractive, as long as the FTC allows it, but this also means handing over the reins of creating the ad to the 'marketing wing' of said channel or publication. For example, the ad agency will brief a popular video channel on an idea they would like them to produce, and the video channel in turn will want to "brand" the sketch in a way that reinforces their own style of content, regardless of what the brief asked. I know of several instances where a popular channel has developed mediocre content, and plain refused to use the agencies scripts in a futile attempt to declare independence from dirty dirty commercial speech known as advertising, so in the end the agencies have revoked the native ad placement. Not every publishing house will be a good match for your brand, and not every publishing house will have any idea how to create an ad just because they can create comedy. Add to that, not every native ad creation will be as popular as the Will Ferrel shilling Old Milwaukee ads, nor will they be able to fly that far under the radar for long with the FTC now more proactive in ensuring that rules for branded, sponsored and native content are followed.

Here’s what content marketing has demonstrated so far: Brand storytelling with rich content is powerful because audiences — the people formerly known merely as “consumers” — pay attention to valuable content and reward brand-authors by sharing such content with friends and strangers on social platforms. This social sharing increases impact (by two to four times, studies show) and reach (up to nine times, mathematical models show), reducing media spend and boosting efficiency (by as much as 100 times).

A story good enough to accomplish all that is actually rendered less effective (from the advertisers’ viewpoint) by appearing to be part of a publisher’s site. Brand-told stories work harder for a brand when they appear on neutral platforms (YouTube, for example) or sites owned by the advertiser.

Why? A brand must be known as the provider of such content so audiences will see the brand as trusted ally, valued adviser, and inventive entertainer. No sane brand would spend money to create great content only to let some publisher or broadcaster get the credit.

Like I said, ego gets in the way. The "branded content producing" departments within editorial companies and news organisations fight to brand both themselves and the client, leaving us with worse advertising, not better.